Tuesday Poem: “Lijssenthoek” — A Haibun By Joanna Preston
Lijssenthoek
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There. Red brick and white stone; an archway anything but triumphal. We wheeled our hired bicycles through the gate-building, blinking at the transition from light to shadow to light again as we stepped out into the garden. And garden it was. Rows of lilies, ranged in front of the crosses that marked the Canadian graves. The New Zealand graves. The South African graves. But not cut flowers – every grave had a flowering plant growing by the headstone, watered and weeded and tended. A garden! How must it feel, to be a gardener here?
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We found his grave. Row 21D. 4564 Corporal Stanley Coombes, 45th Battalion Australian Infantry, died 12th October 1917. I took photographs to send home, the first of our family to visit this place since he died. His full name, place of birth, the names of his parents and his home, written in a ledger almost too heavy for me to lift.
He was twenty-four when he was wounded and sent back home, only to be told that he would die of tuberculosis, likely soon. Twenty-four when he chose to return to the front. Twenty-four when he was wounded at the third battle of Ypres – the Battle of Passchendale – to die of his injuries a few days later in a casualty clearing station in the village of Lijssenthoek.
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There were hop bines growing in a field on the other side of the cemetery. Pale green, twisting up their wires and into the sky. Fitting somehow, that beside ten thousand dead they plant and harvest each year a herb of bitterness, and comfort.
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I’ve read his diaries. Stained and smudged, they were sent home to my great great grandmother. He wrote quietly about fear, and mud, and missing the sound of the currawongs in the evenings. And how, one day like any other, a line of them were trudging across the duckboards, when a sniper took out the man behind him. He said he felt the grip of the other man’s hand tighten briefly, and then let go.
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© Joanna Preston
Reproduced with permission
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About The Poem:
As I’ve noted on recent Tuesdays, I’m currently featuring a series of poems for Tuesday themed around “war” — because I believe poetry often encapsulates the realism of war and has done so, in terms of modern poetry, for the past century.
Michelle Elvy’s “Ordinary Boy” focused on behavior within civil society that reflects the atrocities of war. Both “For A Song” by Barbara Strang, and Lorna Staveley Anker’s “Ellen’s Vigil”, present the first hand accounts of children observing the effects of war on family members. Today, Joanna Preston’s haibun, “Lijssenthoek”, is still an account of the effects of war and loss within families, but the generational gap is wider, “stained and smudged” diaries the most direct connection — beyond bloodline and family heritage — to the lost soldier.
A haibun is a form of prose poetry that is Japenese in origin and traditionally focuses on a “journey”, which may be geographic but may also chart an emotional journey. It also comprises a mix of prose and haiku. “Lijssenthoek” follows the form by charting the narrator’s physical journey, “We wheeled our hired bicycles…” with the emotional: “We found his grave. Row 21D. 4564 Corporal Stanley Coombes…”
I also like the way this haibun overlays the narrator’s journey with that of Corporal Stanley Coombes, close to a century before, and the way the restrained tone throughout conveys a sense of elegy.
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About The Poet:
Joanna Preston is an Australian-born poet, editor and freelance writing tutor who lives in a small rural town in Canterbury, New Zealand. In 2008 she won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Her first collection, The Summer King, was published by Otago University Press in July 2009, and won the Mary Gilmore Award for the best first poetry collection by an Australian author in 2010.
She has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan (Wales). She worked for three years as a part-time tutor in Creative Writing at Christchurch Polytech, and and was co-editor of Kokako magazine from 2009 to 2012.
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